Rebecca Rideal
speaker
1,038 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 21 Sep
Rebecca Rideal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So he
We think the people that he was hanging around with, so later on playwrights like George Etheridge, obviously I've mentioned the Duke of Buckingham already, but his great friend Henry Seville as well, they were all seven, eight, ten years older than him.
So he was a kind of precocious youth that people enjoyed having around them.
Charles II enjoyed it.
his company.
And who doesn't like somebody that's the life and soul of a party?
I mean, it can get a little bit tiring after a while, but that's the kind of persona that he had.
He was a funny, precocious youth.
gang?
Yeah, they are some of them.
There are other members as well, William Wycherley, so many of them, Charles Sedley to an extent as well.
And this merry gang, he refers to a group of courtiers who were known for their quote-unquote wit.
And they were known for drinking a lot.
They were known for having multiple mistresses, as was Charles II, actually, when it came to mistresses.
He probably didn't drink as much as the merry gang, but they were almost like courts.
entertainment, really.
They did come to define Charles II's court.
They were held up as... It's complex.
So on the one hand, they were held up as examples of what the ideal kind of courtier could be.
But then on the other hand, they were used... People could use them to deride Charles's court and the way that it was descending into licentiousness as well.
Showing 81–100 of 1,038 · page 5 of 52
← Previous
Next →